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- 1. Comparative History
AliaksandravaMaryia
2. INDIAN SOCIETIES UNDER SIEGE IN THE UNITED STATES AND
CANADA
During the decades that followed, many western Indians in both
countries became administered people. That is, government officials
told them what they could do, as well as when, where, and how to do
it. By the end of the era their loss of autonomy reached into most
aspects of their lives. At the same time, substantial differences
marked the tribal experiences on each side of the international
border. In the United States the army campaigned repeatedly against
tribes and bands declared hostile by government policy. Farther
north, on the other hand, the North West Mounted Police usually
managed to keep peace. Because of the continuing violence and
bloodshed in the American West, churchmen, reformers, and other
so-called friends of the Indian launched frequent movements to
force the U.S. government to end the fighting, reform the
operations of the Indian Office, and give them more say in the way
tribal people were being treated.
3. INDIAN SOCIETIES UNDER SIEGE IN THE UNITED STATES AND
CANADA
Some tribal people living in the United States resorted to warfare
to protect their lands and customs, while in Canada few violent
confrontations occurred. Leaders in both countries responded to the
continuing demands for more land cessions with delay, rejection, or
compromise, but in almost every case they lost territory to the
advancing whites. While a few groups such as a part of the Hunkpapa
Sioux followed Sitting Bull into Canada briefly, and some Kickapoos
fled from Texas into northern Mexico, this was not a popular option
for most Indians. As they had done before, shamans and prophets
offered guidance. They upheld past beliefs, offered new insights
that combined elements of Christianity and tribal practices, or
gradually accepted the missionaries' teachings. On reservations or
reserves leaders supported education for the children to help the
next generation better deal with the ever-increasing numbers of
whites. In all of these choices, however, Indians had ever less
chance to take the initiative as the century drew to a close. . .
.
4. MOUNTING CRISES IN THE AMERICAN WEST
By 1864 raiding bands of Sioux, Pawnees, Cheyennes, and Arapahos
had cleared many pioneers from the central plains, leading John
Evans, the governor of Colorado, to claim that the raiders had
virtually isolated Denver and the mining camps in the central Rocky
Mountains. That brought retaliation from the Colorado militia, and
in November 1864 the Sand Creek Massacre occurred. . . . The
militiamen tore into the Indian village, which flew a large
American flag to signal peaceful intentions. When the shouting
stopped, the pioneers had killed and mutilated two hundred men,
women, and children. This carnage prompted investigations by the
army and Congress. Meanwhile, the survivors fled, bringing their
story of white treachery to other villagers; thus the war
continued, shifting northward where the miners pouring into the
northern Rockies had to cross Sioux and Cheyenne territory. Even
though the Civil War had ended by 1865, Indians and whites fought a
bitter contest for much of the next generation in the West. Along
the Bozeman Trail leading north from the Platte River Road to the
mining camps of Montana, the Sioux bottled up the troops, at times
virtually besieging the isolated army outposts. . . .
5. MOUNTING CRISES IN THE AMERICAN WEST
American violence and warfare with the tribal people resulted from
a combination of factors, few of which could have been avoided. The
native societies in the West were well led and had strong
attachments to their homelands, and some had strong warrior
traditions. Moreover, they lived atop land seen as desirable for
agriculture or athwart roads and trails over which thousands of
pioneers trudged. Some of the tribal lands encompassed valuable
mineral bodies or timber stands, and westerners had little patience
for the idea that those valuable resources should be monopolized by
the Indians. Few accepted the Indians' right to continue living a
traditional lifestyle. Although only a small proportion openly
called for destroying the tribes, many western Americans wanted the
government to push the tribal people out of their way. On that
issue they shared values with the Canadians. In both nations the
people living nearest the tribes wanted them moved.
6. CONFRONTATIONS ON THE CANADIAN PLAINS
During the late 1860s events that shaped the long-term relations
between the races took place in London and the provincial capitals
in Canada. Moving to grant more local autonomy to parts of their
far-flung empire, the British established the Dominion of Canada in
1867 under the provisions of the British North America Act. The new
government had authority over Ontario and Quebec as well as Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick. At Confederation the new nation included
only four provinces, but in 1869 Rupert's Land, the vast holdings
of the Hudson's Bay Company, became part of Canada. The next year,
1870, the government established the new western province of
Manitoba, while in 1871 British Columbia joined the country, and
two years later Prince Edward Island did the same.
7. CONFRONTATIONS ON THE CANADIAN PLAINS
In 1869, immediately after getting title to the region, the
government sent out survey crews to bring landholdings in the West
into line with those in Ontario.... Fearing that Canadian officials
might ignore their customary landholding patterns, angry at having
virtually no say in their own government, and deeply suspicious of
Canadian motives for moving in on them, the mixed-race peoples of
the West organized under the leadership of Louis Riel Jr., a
Montreal-educated Metis, to proclaim their own local government,
establish courts, and block Canadian penetration of the region
until the disputes could be settled. Riel proclaimed a provisional
government in December 1869, and the next year Manitoba joined the
confederation as a province, if only a small one. While the Indians
and the Canadian government remained at peace during the nation's
first decade in existence, by the mid-1880s this broke down.
Without an army. Canada turned to a uniquely British institution
for its peacekeeping force. Based on the model of the Royal Irish
Constabulary, in 1873 the government created the North West Mounted
Police .
8. EDUCATING FOR ENFRANCHISEMENT
The annual cycle of migration to fish, hunt, or gather took
children away for months at a time. Even when seasonal migrations
ended, village or band matters directly affected attendance. By the
early 1880s some tribal groups ceased cooperating. Some bands
refused to pay for schools. Others interpreted their treaties'
promises to provide teachers to mean that the government should
also provide any buildings or equipment that the teachers might
need. One group even suggested that the teachers build their own
schools. It is unclear whether this argument reflected Indian
understanding of the situation, masked their basic suspicion of the
whites and their institutions, or demonstrated efforts to slow
acculturation. When they realized that the bureaucrats wanted to
replace tribal cultures, the Indians resisted openly and covertly.
They saw the boarding schools as a means of disrupting their family
and village life. If the children remained at those institutions
they could not participate in annual hunting or migratory
activities.
9. EDUCATING FOR ENFRANCHISEMENT
Regardless of the government efforts many tribal groups continued
to ignore the schools. In the mid-1890s one official reported that
"only thirteen schools, indifferently-patronized, are in operation
among the thirty bands occupying this vast district. Two thirds of
the Indians are uncompromising heathens, who have for generations
successfully resisted all the combined efforts of missionaries to
Christianize them." Specific-data support this charge, as an 1892
report showed. That year, of the 15,385 school-aged Indian
children, only 6.350 even appeared on any school roster and of
those only about half, or 3,630. children showed up in the average
daily attendance figures. As in Canada, American authorities saw
the schools as a tool that would help erase Indian cultural
identity.
10. MISSIONARIES AND REFORMERS
Canadian officials had been striving toward the same objective
since the 1860s through their unsuccessful enfranchisement program.
For years it had remained volun-tary; to gain status as an
enfranchised person, the individual reserve dweller had to pass
muster at a hearing conducted by public officials. In the United
States the reformers and the government looked to allotment to do
what removal, military defeat, schools, churches, and model farms
had failed to accomplish the acculturation and assimilation of
tribal people. The process began in 1887, when Senator Henry L.
Dawes of Massachusetts guided the General Allotment Act. or Dawes
Severalty Act, through Congress. The new law gave the president
authority to allot reservations, giving individual Indians title to
the land after twenty-five years and immediate citizenship when
they accepted an allotment. During the next generation many Indians
became citizens. Once all eligible tribal members got their
allotments, the surplus land, or what remained after allotment,
could be placed on the market. Once the program began, tribal
landholdings shrank drastically.
11. MISSIONARIES AND REFORMERS
Livestock raising on the Great Plains proved a more innovative
approach to the need for incorporating Indians into the economy. By
1880 several bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had begun cattle
raising in southern Alberta. The inspector for the western area
reported in 1882 that the Piegans' herd seemed to be growing. In
June that year the nearby Stoney tribe held a successful cattle
roundup. The Indians asked for livestock repeatedly, and by 1888
many bands had herds of cattle, sheep, and swine. Triumphant
officials pointed to the care Indians lavished on their livestock,
and one reported that at least one tribe had helped to kill their
own dogs because the animals attacked their sheep. In fact, between
1885 and 1895 the tribes in the Northwest Territories increased
their cattle herds from 1,230 cattle to 15,378 animals. Clearly
these Indians had more success in influencing policy and the
direction of their own economic development than had their
counterparts south of the border at the same time. . . .
12. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
No one wishes to be called an imperialist, no nation
Wishesto admit to having undergone an imperialistpast,and the
newand emerging nationslike to charge much of their current
instability to the imperial tradition. Many Americans have assumed
that there was no period of American imperialism.Others admit to a
briefimperialist past but prefer to clothe that past in other
words. Wewere an expansionist nation, some historians argue, but
not an imperialist one, a distinction more Jesuitical than
useful.
13. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
But most imperialisms have beenrooted in a sense of mission, and
the American sense differsfrom that of other nationschiefly in that
the United States emphasized differentcharacteristics.The British
senseof mission sprang from a conviction of cultural superiority,
the Japanese from a racialmessage thinly veiled in paternal
rhetoric, the German from an impulse toward a preordained
dialectic, and the Communist sense of mission from what was
conceived tobe a sure knowledge of the world's ultimate needs and
ends. And to say that we all aresinners does not remove the
necessity to see whether and how our sins have differed.Imperialism
was not always in ill-repute, of course. In Britain in the 188()'s
and1890's, Chamberlain and Roseberywere proud to call themselves
imperialists. Theywere helping unfortunate peoples around the world
to come into the light; they werelifting Britain, and not at the
expense of nonwhites butat the expense of other, highlycompetitive
European powers.
14. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Imperialism was a practice; colonialism was astate of mind. Whether
a powerful na
tion extended its control, its influence, or merely its advice over
another people, those
so controlled or so advised not unnaturally resented the
controller. Indeed, we have all
been colonies mentally at one time or another; no one likes, as
they say, to be over a
barrel. Much indignity lies in any subservient position, and yet
there will always be the
powerful and the powerless, and the people with the most power may
not
escapebeingthe nation that is powerless, as Britain learned at Suez
and
as theUnitedStates is learning today. There is obvious indignity in
never being
the moverbutalways the moved,in waiting to see how a foreign
capital or a
foreign embassy will decide one's fate.
15. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The very language of imperialism was all-pervasive. Neither the
Maori in New
Zealand northe Navajo in America had any name for themselves
until
Europeanscoinedthe words. Geographical terms of location Near
East,
Middle East, Far Eastwererelative to a European map. Latin America
became
that portion of the New World whereSpanish and Portuguese were
spoken,
because Americans decided this was so, obliviousof the fact that
French
Canadians considered themselves Latins too. Indonesia's
Sukarnoacquired a
first name because American journalists refused to believe that a
man could
have but one. The names of the saints of European churches, likethe
names
of Europeankings, run across the face of Asia, of Africa, and of
the Pacific worlds
as dictated by thewhims of semiliterate men. The very geography of
race itself
is European, for it wasLeclerc de Buffbn who first classified the
orders of life so that
a later generation wouldhave tools for distinguishing between
peoples as well
as plants.
16. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The United States was part of this climate of opinion. American
responses to some
of the assumptions of European imperialists were bound to be
negative, for the United
States had grown, after all, out of a former colonial empire. The
assumptions that
Americans made about imperial responsibility were conditioned by an
awareness of distance from the scenes of European conflicts, by a
knowledge that the American people
were an amalgam of many of the peoples of the world, some
themselves representative
of the victims of imperial struggles, and from an emotional
predisposition to apply the
basic tenets of republicanism to the imperial situation.
The idea of mission was reinforced by the Federal victory in the
Civil War. In 1867
the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. Following a period
of internal concern
for reconstructing Southern state governments, for reshaping the
machinery of business, and for general domestic economic and social
growth, Americans turned outward.
The second major period of American expansion, and the first to
propel America over
seas, coincided with the world-wide wave of imperial annexations
associated with the
British, French, and German empires and with the awakening of
Japan. If the earlier
period were merely expansionist, as some contend, the growth
between 1898 and 1920
was genuinely imperialist.
17. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Most important, perhaps, is the by no means complimentary fact that
the American
imperialism was more culturally insidious than that of Britain or
Germany, although
perhaps not more so than that of France. To qualify for
self-government among American
states, colonial dependencies had to be utterly transformed, and
the Americans often
showed very little respect for Spanish culture in Puerto Rico, for
Samoan life in Tutuila,
or for the structure of the old Hawaiian kingdoms. The French, with
their mission civilisatria;
were equally willing to insist that, to be civilized, the colonized
must learn the
language and customs of the conqueror. The British, ever more
pragmatic, were con
tent to administer through an elite, creating classes of
Anglo-Indians and other cultural
hyphenates bur leaving the fundamental nature ol the indigenous
culture unchanged.
Since they never anticipated the day when India would become part
of the United
Kingdom, and not until the 1920s did responsible officials give
serious thought even
to the loose linkage now involved in Commonwealth ties, wholesale
Anglicizing was
unnecessary. Precisely because the Americans did anticipate rapid
progress toward
assimilation did they insist upon such brutally fast
Americanization.
18. IMPERIALISM
The contrasts with other Southeast Asian cases are impressive.
Dutch reforms in
Indonesian educational and administrative policy increasingly
placed aristocratic and
upwardly mobile students together inside colonial schools and
offices and outside them
as unemployed, resentful graduates. When French schools in Vietnam
began to produce
their own Western-trained functionaries, local scholarly elites
detached themselves from
the larger educational system and provided important political and
moral leadership to
a nationalist movement of students and a growing class of "new
intelligentsia." The destruction of the old Burmese court (the
Hutladaw) in 1888 and of local authorities
(Myothugyis) gave young Burmese graduates of British colonial
schools a nationalist
mistrust of British intentions (bolstered by the importation of
Indian and Tamil bureaucrats) and a relatively free hand to assume
leadership of" the nationalist campaign. A
third,ideological peculiarity underpins the distinctive arrangement
of U.S. colonial institutions. America's colonial epoch began after
its own Civil Warhelped dispatch
the aristocratic ideology on which the U.S. Souths plantation
economy had rested. In
its place, an orientation favoring individual rights and equality
before the law linked to
Northern industrialization and Western expansion captured
Americans' imagination.
19. The Philippines at the Dawnof U.S. Colonial Rule
Although distinctive aspects of the U.S. administration set the
Philippine regime apart,
the entire arrangement also sat atop a society thatin many ways was
already distinct from
the rest of Southeast Asia. In one respect, this distinctiveness
consists in the recent
Philippine revolutionary climax and the original connection that
existed, however
briefly, betweenarriving U.S. forces and elite Philippine
nationalists. By 1898, the struggle against Spain had passed from
its political to its military phase, and many of the
nation's brightest leaders had given their lives in pushing the
independence struggle to
that point. Moreover, the 1898 revolution took place about twenty
years before anticolonialism
had developed a substantial global political and organizational
infrastructure, and this
bit of timing had significant consequences. The decrepitude of the
Spanish colonial
regime, at war with the United States and already bereft of prime
acquisitions in Latin
America, accounted in substantial measure for Filipinos' early
successesat the nineteenth
century's close. But the Philippines' comparatively early
revolutionary upsurge also segregated the Philippine struggle from
some of the more important events in that global
history, such as the impact (especially in Asia) of the Japanese
victory over Russia in
1905 and of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
20. Philippine Collective ActionUnder U.S. Rule
It is possible to divide Philippine protest and collective action
under U.S. colonialism
roughly into three periods. The first period . . . divides into two
American wars: one
against Muslims (Moros) in Mindanao, and the other against
Christians in Luzon and
the Visayas. Both began in 1899. The Mora wars lasted until 1912,
and the Christian
wars lasted until 1907. Filipinos at first engaged Americans in
artillery battles along the
railway corridor from Manila to Pangasinan, but heavy casualties
soon forced them to
switch to guerrilla tactics. After the switch, the Americans
shifted their attention
to severing the connection between the guerrilla fighters and their
mass base.
Even before this killing ended, some Filipinos began new forms of
struggle and collective action, designed to secure positions within
and under the U.S.
Regimeratherthan to displace that rule. As the Philippine-American
War moved out of Manila andinto the countryside, rapid capitalist
expansion produced new activity among workersin Manila and would
shortly do so in important secondary cities such as Iloilo
andCebu.
21. AMERICANS, EUROPEANS, AND THE MOVIES
the dramatic changes in Americancultural styles and values in the
waryears and after have sometimes confused historiansof motion
pictures, who, like other historians of the arts, sometimes
oversimplify aboutthe larger culture in which their medium was
shaped. . . . American society and culture were changing faster and
more fundamentally than the movies themselves. . . . Members of the
urban leisure and professional classes. . . led the way in
discardingthe socialcode symbolizedby thatVictoriandrawing-room
scene. The traditional middle-class moral orderhad, even before the
war,been losing ground in its effort to maintain small-town values
in an increasingly urban,industrial and ethnically heterogeneous
society. Its drive to recover dominance duringthe war through
excessive patriotism, moralism and repression, though leading to
impressive victories with the enactment of Prohibition and
immigration restriction, alsodrove segments of the culturally
influential urban elites away from adherence to traditionalbeliefs
and behavior. The targets of the campaign for conformity the
recently arrived immigrants andtheir children, the "hyphenated
Americans" related in a more confused and ambiguous way to the
dominant social order.
22. AMERICANS, EUROPEANS, AND THE MOVIES
To the spokesmen and spokeswomen of the dominant order, the movies
stood in direct opposition to respectable American values and
institutions: power over moviesrested largely in the hands of
foreign-born producers; even native-born movie workerscame from
marginal and disreputable subsocieties of vaudeville and stock
companytheater; and the movies were full of incitements to crime
and salacious behavior.Movies thus came to play a central role in
the cultural conflicts that followed WorldWar I. On both sides of
the struggle, movies came to be seen as offeringvalues
distinctlydifferent from those of the older middle-class culture,
and providing greater opportunities for ethnic minorities than
other economic sectors. Immigrants and their childrenwere attracted
to movie culture not merely because movies were cheap, ubiquitous
andappealing as fantasy or entertainment; their preference became a
conscious, one mightalmost say a political, choice. In American
society, movies became a major factor in the reorientation of
traditional values Wilter Benjamin's word "liquidation" in the
American context would be too strong.
23. CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE 1920S
The tactics of moviemakers in transforming social codes were
nowhere moresuccessfulthan in the films of Cecil B. DeMille.He
became notorious earlyin 1918when heunveiled the first in a series
of spicy morality tales of extramarital temptation. Old Wivesfor
New. Hisaudacity has since becomea centerpiece of the Hollywood
legend, but likemanysuch stories, the facts are much more
interesting. The DeMille legend focuses especially on the most
controversialof his early postwarfilms, Male andFemale (1919).
Moralists grew outraged as soon as they learned
ofDeMille'ssuggestive change of title from its source, James M.
Barries play TheAdmirableCrichton, and the picture disappointed no
one's expectations. In its famous bathroomscene Gloria Swanson, as
Lady Mary, steps into a sunken bath the size of a small swimming
pool, revealing a momentary glimpse of her breasts. Later
DeMilleintroduced alavish Babylonian fantasy sequence not to be
found in the original, taking his inspiration from a poem by
William Ernest Henley, whose lines the butler Crichton quotes inthe
play: "I was a king in Babylon/And you were a Christian slave." By
all accounts, Male and Female could never have been made before
World WarI. Itwas "a highly moral picture," Adolph Zukor, whose
Famous Players-Lasky companyproduced the film, recalled in his
autobiography, "yet its emotional theme the noblelady falling in
love with the butler would probably not have been acceptable to
prewar audiences." In LewisJacobs' classic study, Male and Female
is called "more daring inits subject matter than any other picture
Hollywood had produced."
24. AMERICANS, EUROPEANS, AND THE MOVIES
DeMille, was, above all, a consummatesentimentalist. He had the
knack of titillatingaudiences while at the same time reinforcing
their conventional standards of lettingthem eat their cake and have
it too. A few years later he discovered the most congenialform for
his particular skills, the religious epic, which proved the perfect
vehicle for hisdeft combination of moral didacticism and orgiastic
fantasy. His "modern stories" in theearly postwar period were
preliminary expressions of this long-enduring formula. Theytold
moviegoers of the necessity for, and the boundaries of, social
change that wouldnot disturb the inherited moralorder; and in dream
sequences of opulent sensuality, setin ancient times, they provided
a voyeuristic glimpse of forbidden pleasures and desires.
25. AMERICANS, EUROPEANS, AND THE MOVIES
Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (1923), directed by Fred Newmeyer and
Sam Taylor, is aclassic example of what happens to the aspiring
young man in silent-movie comedy.Harold isasmall-town boygoingoff
to the cityto starthis career andearn wealth andstatus sufficient
to enable him to marry his small-town girl. He takes ajob ina
departmentstore and writes glowing but false letters home telling
of rapid advancement. Whenthegirl comes to visit he must gothrough
elaborate comic byplay to demonstrate his exaltedposition without
being caught.Meanwhile, in an effort to promote himself, he
arranges a publicity stunt for thestore, a climb up its outside
walls by a "human fly." An earlier joke played on a policeman
backfires, however, and the cop chases the human fly, so that as
the crowdgathersHarold has lost his performer. To save his idea
Harold goes up the wall himself, in oneof the superb comic stunts
in the history of motion pictures. His climb is impeded
successively by pigeons, a tennis net, a painter's board, a clock,
a mouse and a weathergauge. Each new encounter throws him into
graver danger. After one harrowing comicescape after another, he
finally reaches the roofand falls into his girl friend's arms.
Onecould hardly ask for more graphic satire on the theme of "upward
mobility."
26. THE MEANINGS OF AMERICAN JAZZ IN FRANCE
As Paris settled back intocivilian life after the war,
jazzmusicians struck up their rhythmsin venues all over the city.
Audiences heard it in cabarets, nightclubs, dance halls,
restaurants, and theaters. Many music halls first presented jazz
during the regular show's intermission, but they soon moved it to
the main program. In cafes, owners often decided totake advantage
of the music's growing popularity and hired jazz bands to lure
customersinto theirestablishments. Thesekinds of commercial
concerns werecrucial motivations inIntroducingjazz to Paris. Just
as jazz musicians were fanning out across Paris, important changes
in the city'sentertainment culture were also underway to
accommodate the newtastes ofaudiences.The evolution was
particularly striking in one of the favorite gathering places of
the1920s, the dance hall. The "dance craze" of the postwar years
provided a business incentive to revamp old venues into flashy and
fashionable hot spots so that they couldprovide space to do the
latest steps. Many critics believed that not only was the
musicdifferent in these places because of the introduction ofjazz,
they were also beginning tolose theirtraditional character. Some
came to see the growing presence ofjazzthroughout the city along
with the ways in which it altered where and how Parisians
enjoyedthemselves as an indication of the changing nature of modern
life more generally. Andtalking about jazz was one way of debating
what those changes meant.
27. THE MEANINGS OF AMERICAN JAZZ IN FRANCE
Another modern development, the new media that were created or
improved in the early twentieth century, allowed the sounds of jazz
to be carried across great distances. Indeed, perceptions about
jazz music cannot be separated from the technologyespecially
phonographs and radiosfrom which it roared. Being connected with
such devices further equated jazz with the cutting edge of cultural
developments. Jazz was un emusiquenegre whose immediate origins
were African American, but whose ultimate roots French writers
generally traced to the jungles of Africa. The African
sensibilities, French critics stressed, had been preserved in jazz
because of the common racial connection between its performers and
their ancestors on the so-called Dark Continent. Even when white
musicians played jazz, they were believed to be performing a black
musical style. At the height of its popularity, jazz music could
suggest an "Africanization" of Francean ironic reversal of the
colonial project simultaneously underway in sub-Saharan Africa in
the 1920s and 1930s.Jazz rested at the intersection of these two
powerful and controversial trends, thereby making it all the more
meaningful and controversial.